In thus opposing form and force to each other, Ruskin is actually referring to two kinds of forces. There exist those forces which resemble the potter's foot in producing mere numerically regulated movements (so that this part of the potter's activity can be replaced by a power-machine), and others, which like the potter's hand, strive for a certain end and so in the process create definite forms. Ruskin goes a step further still in The Queen of the Air, where he speaks of selective order as a mark of the spirit: 'It does not merely crystallize indefinite masses, but it gives to limited portions of matter the power of gathering, selectively, other elements proper to them, and binding these elements into their own peculiar and adopted form. ... 'For the mere force of junction is not spirit, but the power that catches out of chaos, charcoal, water, lime and what not, and fastens them into given form, is properly called "spirit"; and we shall not diminish, but strengthen our cognition of this creative energy by recognizing its presence in lower states of matter than our own.' (II, 59.)1 When Ruskin wrote this passage, he could count on a certain measure of agreement from his contemporaries that the essence of man himself is spirit, though certainly without any very exact notion being implied. This persuaded him to fight on behalf of the spirit, lest its activity on the lower levels of nature should not be duly acknowledged. To-day, when the purely physical conception of nature has laid hold of the entire man, Ruskin might have given his thought the following turn: '... and we shall certainly attain to no real insight into this creative force (of the spirit) at the level of man, unless we win the capacity to recognize its activity in lower states of matter.' What Ruskin is really pointing towards is the very thing for which Goethe formed the concept 'type'. And just as Ruskin, like Goethe, recognized the signature of the spirit in the material processes which work towards a goal, so he counted as another such signature what Goethe called Steigerung, though certainly without forming such a universally valid idea of it: 'The Spirit in the plant - that is to say, its power of gathering dead matter out of the wreck round it, and shaping it into its own chosen shape - is of course strongest in the moment of flowering, for it then not only gathers, but forms, with the greatest energy.' It is characteristic of Ruskin's conception of the relationship between man's mind and nature that he added: 'And where this life is in it at full power, its form becomes invested with aspects that are chiefly delightful to our own senses.' (II, 60.) Obviously, a mind capable of looking at nature in this way could not accept such a picture of evolution as was put forward by Ruskin's contemporary, Darwin. So we find Ruskin, in The Queen of the Air, opposing the Darwinistic conception of the preservation of the species as the driving factor in the life of nature: